Operate

Service desk

Tickets arrive from email, the client portal, alerts and technicians, and land in one queue with SLA tracking that you can turn off for clients who do not have one.

Where tickets come from

• Email: connect a support mailbox (per-tenant IMAP) and inbound mail becomes tickets. Replies thread onto the right ticket via the [Ticket #ID] subject tag, and duplicate webhook deliveries are de-duplicated.
• Client portal: end users submit requests, or describe the problem to Ask Helio, which investigates first and raises a well-written ticket if a human is needed.
• Alerts: criticals, security findings and backup failures auto-ticket per the noise policy.
• Manual and API: technicians, or your own systems via the public API.

Working a ticket

Tickets carry status, priority, category, assignment and a full comment trail. Public comments email the client contact; internal notes never leave the team. Tickets link to the device they concern, so the live device state is one click from the conversation. Helio can draft replies and propose fixes on email tickets; how autonomous that is allowed to be is a per-tenant setting.

Canned responses and CSAT

Canned responses are reply templates managed in Settings; the reply box on every ticket has a picker that drops one straight into your message, so the password-reset walkthrough gets written once. When a client-raised ticket is resolved or closed, the update email carries a one-click satisfaction rating: Great, Okay or Poor, no login required. The rating and any comment land on the ticket, and the link stays valid for 30 days so a client can change their mind. Tickets Helios raised proactively from alerts never ask for a rating; clients are only asked about work they knew was happening.

Time tracking and billing

Every ticket takes time entries in one tap (15, 30, 60 minutes or custom), marked billable or not. Give each client an hourly rate and the Billing page shows the month per client, with a one-click CSV export whose columns import into any accounting package. The CSV is the invoice truth: line totals are rounded per entry and the export total is the sum of its lines.

QuickBooks invoice sync. Connect QuickBooks Online under Settings → Accounting, pick the service item and tax code your invoices use, and map each client to a QuickBooks customer once from the Billing page. From then on, one click pushes a month's billable time into QuickBooks as a draft invoice: one line per time entry, totals matching the CSV to the penny. Invoices are never emailed automatically; you review and send them from QuickBooks. Xero sync is next on the roadmap.

SLAs, honestly

Response and resolution targets are tracked per priority, with per-client overrides. Two honest details: breach and due-soon states are surfaced on the dashboard before they happen, not after; and clients without an SLA can have SLA tracking switched off entirely, so internal or best-effort clients never generate fake urgency.

Internal work

Tickets categorised as internal are for MSP operations and never appear on any client-facing surface or email. Your own housekeeping does not leak into a client's portal.

Reports and QBRs

Scheduled email reports summarise each client's health, tickets and patching on a cadence you choose, built to render in real inboxes. Quarterly, the QBR generator drafts a business review per client that you edit and print.